Texas Our Texas

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Firing the Front Line Why Hollowing Out the State Department Destroys American Power

I’ve met FSOs who learned the language, understood the culture, and stayed long after the rest of Washington had lost interest.

When you fire 1,300 of them, you don’t just eliminate jobs.

You gut the connective tissue of American soft power.

open.substack.com/pub/trygveol...

167. The Inconsistent Court Strikes Again Comparing Monday's unexplained grant of emergency relief in the Department of Education downsizing case to how the justices handled President Biden's student loan program is ... telling.

Inconsistency, thy name is SCOTUS.

167. The Inconsistent Court Strikes Again www.stevevladeck.com/p/167-the-in...

White House Pushes Texas to Redistrict, Hoping to Blunt Democratic Gains

www.nytimes.com/2025/06/09/u...

Sergeant Clovis Lee May, of Deming, New Mexico, was fatally wounded on May 22, 1969 in the Quang Tin province of South Vietnam. He was 24 years old. REMEMBERED.

What They Died For Publisher's Roundup 19, Memorial Day Edition

What They Died For
open.substack.com/pub/contrari...

At Omaha beach today. Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Bradley did not ask about minerals.

The intent isn't to send her to prison for committing a crime, it's to frighten and intimidate the courts. It's going to make people think twice before they do anything that may anger Trump and his administration.

Attys in Abrego Garcia case seeking conference with Judge Xinis at 1pm today due Trump Adm allegedly having filed "nothing of substance" in response to interrogatories & requests for production.
storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

A reminder that none of these daily status updates are accomplishing their primary purpose of updating Judge Xinis on the steps the Trump admin is taking to secure Abrego Garcia's release, because as far as we know, it is taking no such steps. (More soon on this.)

This Earth Day, there are some reasons to be hopeful about the climate Amid devastating environmental forecasts, there are things to be hopeful about.

It’s easy to feel like the planet is on fire — because, well, sometimes it literally is.

But it’s not all doom: Innovators are reimagining how we power our lives, nature is pulling off surprising comebacks, cities are cleaning their air and nations are opening their wallets.

How are things going with respect to the discovery before Judge Xinis in Abrego García?

Well, the government describes as a “false premise” that it “has been ordered to facilitate Abrego García’s release.”

(That’s *literally* what #SCOTUS held.)

pacer-documents.s3.amazonaws.com/84/578815/09...

-- on Substack The 4th Circuit issues a compelling clarion call, flat out denying the Trump Admin’s effort to reverse the MD federal judge overseeing the Abrego-Garcia case. “The government is asserting a right to...

BREAKING: read this from the latest, striking, 4th Circuit decision rejecting Trump Admin's efforts in Abrego-Garcia case.
substack.com/@ghost22/not...

Wow, 4th circuit did not hold back in this opinion, see 🧵

Bring. Him. Home. Our cause is here; our time is now.

“The old American order is dead. It ended on April 14, 2025, when a Latin American strongman sat in the Oval Office and discussed sending U.S. citizens to foreign concentration camps with the American president while they jointly defied the Supreme Court.” @jvl.bsky.social

It's just very very hard to litigate against a party that is not acting in good faith and doesn't care about the penalties the courts have to offer.

He’s threatening media companies who are critical of him.

He’s talking about sending Americans to foreign prisons.

He’s signing executive orders to investigate former staff members who spoke out against him.

He’s defying the Supreme Court.

Don’t you see what’s happening here?

Are Any of Us Safe Now? The Trump administration claims the power to punish “offenders” with no due process.

"We are outsourcing torture and murder. What kind of president, what kind of political party, can look at that with satisfaction?" And what American can not at least wonder about their own security?

New from @monacharen.bsky.social: www.thebulwark.com/p/are-any-of...

This is a lie. Here's how Mr. Abrego gets back.

1. Bukele releases him from CECOT.
2. The US gives him humanitarian parole as part of the court order requiring them to facilitate his return.
3. His family buys him a plane ticket.
4. He flies home.

THIS ISN'T HARD.

'Out of our hands': The most dangerous lie in Trump’s deportation doctrine The stalling—thinly disguised as deliberation—only reinforces the truth. The refusal is political.

open.substack.com/pub/contrari...

Big Law capitulation has many root causes.

A major cause is a belief in most Big Law circles that the main criteria for “top firm” or blue chip status, which formerly was client service and clients’ success …

… is now the almighty PPP.

(No, not the Payroll Protection Program. IYKYK.)

Yeah, they are literally defying the Supreme Court.

I hope Xinis' hardest decision is deciding precisely WHO to hold in contempt, not whether.

2. DOJ's refusal to provide updates on efforts to get Abrego Garcia released from custody is also an affront to what the unanimous Supreme Court ordered.⬇️

I am sure Judge Xinis will take action, now with the backing of both the Fourth Circuit and the Supreme Court.

Judge Xinis is now having to deal with an emboldened DOJ on steroids. DOJ pulled that SS/classified 'trick' in the JJG case before CJ Boasberg. Perhaps there will be another trip up and down in Abrego Garcia's case. Hopefully, the trip will start with contempt.

I wonder what Paula Xinis is thinking right now at home as she reads this. I wonder who she calls for advice or support. To be inside her mind at this moment in history must be such a stressful thing. But even that is nothing compared to the stress being put on this poor innocent man in a gulag.

The updates were Xinis's thing, not SCOTUS's. SCOTUS said that Xinis had to clarify her order, which she did. But Roberts gifted the regime some really dumb language (effectuate vs. facilitate, deference due to the executive), and now here we are

said.

“What the market really didn’t like was the random crazy math of the tariffs,” said Simon Johnson, a Nobel laureate economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It seemed like they didn’t know what they were doing and didn’t care. It’s a whole new level of madness.” (NYT excerpt.)

“The whole world has decided that the U.S. government has no idea what it’s doing,” said Mark Blyth, a political economist at Brown University and co-author of the forthcoming book “Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers.” (NYT excerpt)

Here is a link. DOJ has now seemingly twice refused to provide the information Judge Xinis ordered them to provide about steps they are taking to "facilitate the return" of Mr. Abrego.